he Clarendon Report was produced by a Royal Commission appointed in 1861 to investigate the "revenues, management, studies and instruction" of the nine leading English public schools: Eton, Harrow, Westminster, Winchester, Charterhouse, Rugby, Shrewsbury, St Paul's and Merchant Taylors'. The Commission and its Report are usually named for the chairman, the Earl of Clarendon. The Report published in 1864 led to an Act of Parliament (1868) which laid down new rules for the governance of the schools. The Commission was one of a series of investigatory bodies which began with the Royal Commissions appointed in 1850 to investigate Oxford and Cambridge, and continued with the Newcastle Commission on elementary education (1858). Secondary schooling in nineteenth-century England was, unlike that in France or Germany, provided by private enterprise and charitable endowment; the state typically did not intervene. Oxford and Cambridge, similarly, were not centrally-funded institutions, but the educational wings of the Church of England, whose articles of faith their students were obliged to accept on matriculation (Oxford) or at graduation (Cambridge). Between 1850 and 1870, all this began to change as the state investigated educational provision, beginning a process which led eventually to Forster's Education Act of 1870 authorising state elementary schools and Balfour's Act of 1902, which did the same for secondary schools. The Clarendon Commission was followed by the Taunton Commission of 1864 on the endowed grammar schools: its report (1868) dealt with the whole of the endowed sector apart from the nine Clarendon schools (about 800 schools in all).
Left: The original building at Harrow School containing the Old Schools & Old Speech Room. Right: Entrance to the former Headmaster's House, College Street, Winchester, by G. S. Repton, 1839-42.
Broadly speaking, the seven Commissioners represented the liberal wing of opinion within the social elite educated at schools of the kind they were investigating. Five were experienced politicians, the other two Oxbridge academics. Two had been educated at Eton; one each at Westminster, Rugby and Christ's Hospital; two had been privately schooled. Four had been to Oxford, three to Cambridge; all had gained first-class examination results in Classics except the chairman, George Villiers, fourth Earl of Clarendon, politician, former foreign secretary and confidant of Queen Victoria.1 The other Commissioners were the politician and philanthropist William Courtenay, eleventh Earl of Devon; the civil service reformer Sir Stafford Northcote; William Thompson, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge; Hon. Edward Twiselton, who had previously headed the Poor Law Commission; Lord Lyttelton, landowner and brother-in-law of William Gladstone; and Henry Vaughan, Professor of Modern History at Oxford from 1848 to 1858. Towards the end of their work, in August 1864, Clarendon gave a succinct portrait of his fellow-Commissioners to a friend who was meditating the Royal Commission on Endowed Schools: "Lyttelton would make a very good chairman – the only one of the late lot who would. Devon is weak, Northcote pedantic, Thompson idle, Twisleton quirky, Vaughan mad; yet they all had merits and worked usefully together, except Vaughan who, tho' a man of real genius, is unmanageable."2 One of the pleasures of reading through the Report is to watch these very different men interrogating, cajoling and at times relentlessly pursuing witnesses.
Inclusions and exclusions
The prime motivation behind the appointment of the Commission was to investigate the management and finances of Eton College; an intention which was veiled by broadening the Commission's scope to include other schools. Private and public protests on the management of the school had been erupting intermittently for half a century or more. In 1860, however, a series of articles in the new Cornhill Magazine and in the Edinburgh Review increased the pressure on Eton by highlighting the alleged misappropriation of endowment income on a large scale by the Provost and Fellows.3 The articles were written by Matthew Higgins, an Old Etonian and campaigning journalist, and made the case against Eton very effectively. In adding other schools to the real target, the government seem to have been in some difficulty to know which to choose. Forty years earlier, six of the schools (Eton, Winchester, Harrow, Westminster, Charterhouse and Rugby) had clearly been seen as a single elite group, and had been explicitly excluded from the remit of the Charity Commissioners.4 Now, in 1861, the matter was further complicated by the interest of some schools in being selected, for reasons of status, but not actually being investigated. When the Report was finally tabled in the House of Commons, St Paul's and Merchant Taylors' managed to avoid being covered by the resultant legislation.
Coats of arms, left to right: (a) Eton College. (b) Chartehouse. (c) Shrewsbury.
Eventually nine schools were chosen, all sixteenth-century foundations except for Winchester (1382), Eton (1440) and Charterhouse (1609). The major distinction apart from age was between the seven boarding schools and the two London day schools, St Paul's and Merchant Taylors'.5 Perhaps the most surprising omission was Christ's Hospital, a charity foundation in London which had been on some of the original lists of schools for investigation. On the other hand, Shrewsbury only narrowly got onto the list; it probably owed its inclusion to the remarkable achievement of its headmasters, Samuel Butler (1798-1836) and his pupil Benjamin Kennedy (1836-66) in making it the leading classical school in the country. Clearly the list was to some extent arbitrary and the result of a process of back-room negotiation.6 In addition to the nine schools, the Commissioners also collected information from several recent foundations which they saw as offering models of reform, teaching science or "modern subjects" rather than classics: the proprietary Cheltenham College (1841), founded as a limited company; Marlborough College (1843), run by pupils of Thomas Arnold; and two City day schools, University College School (1830) and City of London School (1836). The narrow inclusion of Shrewsbury and the equally narrow exclusion of Christ's Hospital is reflected in Howard Staunton's The Great Schools of England, published in the year after the Report was issued, whose series of articles begins with the Clarendon schools, ending with Shrewsbury, and continues with Christ's Hospital.7
Inclusion in the Commission's remit was thus a confirmation of existing status, or a boost for those schools which were not generally seen as belonging to the highest echelon. The news that the Commission had included Shrewsbury in its list of public schools led to an immediate increase in the school's enrolments.8 It did not, however, confer an automatic cachet recognised in all quarters. In February 1866, the cricket captain of Shrewsbury wrote to his opposite number at Westminster to suggest a fixture between the two schools. The reply was that "Westminster plays no schools except Public Schools, and the general feeling of the school quite coincides with that of the Committee of the Public Schools Club, who issue this list of public schools – Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Westminster and Winchester." The riposte was quick to come:
I cannot allow your answer to my first letter to pass unnoticed. I have only to say that a school, which we have the authority of Camden for stating was the most important school in England when Westminster was unknown, which Her Majesty has included in the list of public schools by the royal commission, and which, according to the report of the commissioners, is more distinctly public than any other school, cannot be deprived of its rights as a public school by the assertions of a Westminster boy, or by the dictum of the self-styled Public Schools Club. I regret to find from your letter that the Captain of the Westminster Eleven has yet to learn the first lesson of a true public school education, the behaviour due from one gentleman to another.9
The Commission at work
The Commissioners set about their task with admirable thoroughness, and this is reflected in the four thick folio volumes of the Report. They contain the verbatim record of interviews between the Commissioners and headmasters, masters, and pupils; questionnaires and answers to them; written evidence; and a mass of supportive documentation which includes detailed tabular accounts of what was taught and what books were read at each school. As Dora Pym commented in a centenary assessment, '"Not a rent roll, not a leg of mutton, not a grammar book or moment in a fag's day escaped attention."10 The numbered questions and answers run into the thousands (9,621 for Eton alone), and enable the reader to witness the interchanges between probing Commissioners and sometimes evasive witnesses. The mass of verbatim detail also enables us to gain a glimpse of the personalities involved.
In October 1861, questionnaires were sent out to the schools. These contained 85 questions covering every aspect of the schools' activities, and must have taken some time to answer.11 Having absorbed and discussed the responses, the Commissioners then visited the schools in May, June and July 1862. Finally, between May 1862 and May 1863 they held 127 meetings, at which they questioned 130 witnesses. A remarkable indication of the Commissioners' thoroughness is the letter their secretary sent to the nine headmasters in November 1862, proposing for the following January or early February a detailed examination of the schools' fifth-form pupils, which they thought 'should not occupy more than six days' and which would consist of about a dozen papers – almost all of them classical. This somewhat daring proposal was immediately shot down by the headmasters, who declared that they were not prepared to cooperate. Some added that any such examination would injure their own authority; others declared that no such examination could provide an adequate test of pupils' ability; several pointed out that their schools already conducted their own examinations. The only headmasters to suggest that they might be willing to allow the proposed examination were Frederick Temple of Rugby and Benjamin Kennedy of Shrewsbury; but both pointed out that their schools would not reassemble after the Christmas holiday until 12 February, so the proposed timing was impossible. The Commissioners retreated at speed: in December their secretary told the headmasters that since the "general concurrence" they had hoped for could not be obtained, 'they have … decided on pursuing the subject no further."12
Other initiatives were more successful, and included information-gathering exercises in Britain and on the continent. Oxford and Cambridge tutors and lecturers, for example, were sent a list of questions, their answers to which can be found in Appendix C of the Report.13 These letters are full of information and insights on the changing patterns of school and university student abilities and activities. The consensus is that many of the boys sent up to the ancient universities by the large public schools were unable to answer simple questions on the Latin and Greek authors they had been reading. The Etonians were seen as polite and sociable, but often not very bright; some tutors remarked that boys were sent to Eton not to learn, but to make social connections. A few of them commented that boys of relatively low social standing tend to succeed through hard work, while the sons of the aristocracy, who were often to found at Eton, had no need to try hard – they would never need to work in adult life. It is hardly surprising, then, to hear that though Eton had an entrance examination, those who failed it were admitted to the Lower School instead of the main school, and that "hardly any amount of ignorance prevents a boy's coming to Eton."14
"Eton School & the Boys' Arch," illustrated by Robert Dudley for W. H. Russell's A Memorial of the Marriage of H.R.H. Albert Prince of Wales and H.R.H. Alexandra of Denmark (London: Day, 1864, by kind permission of the National Portrait Gallery London).
The section on Eton in the Report, at 322 pages, is far longer than those on the other schools: Westminster comes a distant second with 142 pages. The other seven schools range from 88 pages (Harrow) to a mere 50 (Shrewsbury). While the amount of time spent on interviews clearly reflects to some extent the sheer size of a school – in 1861 Eton had 783 pupils, Shrewsbury 132 and Charterhouse only 116 – it is difficult not to conclude that it is also an indication of where the problems lay. Eton and Westminster were the schools which had accumulated the largest number of accreted traditions which ran counter to their statutes, and it was these that the Commissioners homed in on in their questioning. On the very first day, the Provost of Eton (Charles Goodall), its Registrar and its Bursar were grilled about the college's endowments and the way they were used. They were soon on the defensive, since it quickly emerged that funds designed to provide for pupils had for centuries been siphoned off by the Provost and Fellows (the governing body) for their own use. Fines on college property had not been paid into its accounts, but divided among the Provost and Fellows, to the amount of about £127,000 over the last twenty years. A trust fund set up by a previous Provost to supply food for the scholars had instead been held on to by the College, and had recently been borrowed from by the governing body to carry out building repairs. Confronted by the college's original statutes, Goodall and his minions could only repeat again and again that they were following long-established tradition, but his clearly did not wash with the Commissioners.
As the above references to Fellows indicate, Eton was, like Winchester, a collegiate school. As well as having a Head Master, each had a Provost (at Eton) or a Warden (at Winchester) who had the final say on policy. The result in both cases was that changes were rare unless both parties agreed. At Eton it is clear that Edward Hawtrey, appointed Provost in 1840 on his resignation as Head Master, had interfered constantly with his successor in his old post. Predictably, the Provost and Fellows seemed happy with the arrangement; the assistant masters' evidence gave a very different view. Of these, the most outspoken was William Johnson, one of a minority of liberal masters at Eton who struggled to keep the flag of culture and aesthetic value flying in an often hostile and philistine environment:
Lord Clarendon: What is your opinion with respect to the present relations between the Provost and the Head Master?
W. Johnson: They vary very much according to the disposition of the Provost and his love of interference. The interference of Dr Hawtrey, when Provost, with the Head Master, was constant.
Lord Clarendon: In what way?
W. Johnson: He interfered in such a way that the Head Master was simply crippled in all directions. The late Head Master did not like to press his own opinion in regard to any matter against that of the Provost.15
From report to legislation
In March 1865, a year after the Report was published, a Public Schools Bill was tabled in the House of Lords; it met considerable opposition and was referred to a Select Committee, where St Paul's was removed from the Bill (Merchant Taylors' had already been excluded). Later in the year parliamentary time ran out and the Bill lapsed. In the next eight years, it was to be followed by over a dozen further Bills, all of which ran into trouble. The only substantial product of a long process of negotiation between special interests was the Public Schools Act of 1868.16 This established new rules for governing bodies and financial administration, but did not deal with the schools' curricula. The battles over governors, headmasters' powers and finance had marginalised all other questions. The result was that the overwhelmingly classical nature of the schools' teaching was hardly affected. As we have seen, the Commissioners were themselves classically educated, and so it is no surprise to find that their proposed curriculum gave 11 out of 20 hours to "Classics, with History and Divinity," and only 3 hours to "Arithmetic and mathematics."17 Mathematics and science had, as the Report found, been introduced into one or two of the schools in the 1850s, but often in a perfunctory way. Here, as in other areas, Rugby was taken by the Commissioners as a model case, and Frederick Temple, its liberal headmaster, emerged as one of the most impressive witnesses during their lengthy investigations. But the liberal tendency he represented formed part of the continuing dominance of the leading public schools by the upper and upper middle classes. In the legislative debates on successive Bills in Parliament, attempts by local citizens to secure access for their sons, on the basis of the schools' founding endowments, all failed. The Clarendon Report thus looked forward to the recommendations of the Endowed Schools Commissioners, who proposed three grades of secondary schools, defined by leaving age, the amount of Classics taught, and the social class of pupils' parents.18
The scale and detail of the Report makes it possible to trace both these major tendencies and a host of others through the text of the four volumes. Overall, the Report constitutes the single richest source we have for the curriculum, finances, management and social life of the nine schools. Like the other great Victorian reports on schools (e.g. Taunton on the endowed schools in 1868, in eight volumes; Bryce on secondary schools in 1895, in nine volumes) it constitutes a massive and still underused source of information.19
Links to Related Material
- The Public School Experience in Victorian Literature
- A Reader Objects to Our Definition of Public Schools in England
- Critical Observations on British Public Schools
- State Involvement in Public Education before the 1870 Education Act
- Science and Mathematics in Victorian Education: A Bibliography
- The Anti-Technological Bias of Victorian Education and Britain's Economic Decline
Created 30 July 2025